Don't You Wish

  “Who is he?”

  “Dr. Jim Monroe,” she repeats, sliding her hand to another picture, where the same guy stands in front of a building with two giant gold intertwined F’s behind him. “The cosmetic surgeon who started Forever Flawless?”

  “Oookay.” I think I’ve seen this guy on TV, hawking a chain of plastic-surgery centers popping up all over the country like they’re McDonald’s, but that doesn’t explain the tears. “Why are you crying?”

  “I could have married him, Annie,” she says, another harsh whisper, as though saying the words out loud is somehow wrong. “I dated him in college. He went to med school at Pitt.”

  “Really?” Totally did not know Mom had a doctor boyfriend pre-Dad. I take another look at the magazine, and Jim. Not bad-looking, in a young Ben Stiller kind of way, maybe midforties. And, whoa, dripping in dollars. “Yowza, this guy’s loaded.”

  She snorts softly. “Estimated net worth of over a billion.”

  Holy crap. “With a B?”

  “Billion,” she repeats, swiping some mascara and smearing it across her cheek. “Look at that house, Annie. Just … look.”

  “It’s nice.” Which is like saying the ocean is wet. Mom hands the magazine to me so she can dig a tissue out of her bag, and I skim the article, picking up key words. Words like … “twenty-three-thousand square feet” … “Star Island in Miami Beach” … “pizza oven in the kitchen.” “He’s got his own pizza oven?”

  “Look at the last paragraph,” she says, her voice cracking. “Read it.”

  Our tour ended in the master bedroom, where Dr. Monroe showed off the cavern of a “Hers” walk-in closet. Only there is no “her” in Jim Monroe’s life. “I’m still waiting for my princess,” he says with a wistful smile. “And, no, she doesn’t have to be flawless, just fabulous.”

  I throw up a little in my mouth.

  “I came so close.” Mom blows her nose, and I cringe, praying that no one hears. “So close to having that.”

  She stuffs the tissue back into her purse and takes the magazine from me, staring at it again.

  “How close?” I ask, a little fascinated by this new side of a woman I never thought about with anyone but my dad. And am not sure I want to.

  “When he finished med school, he went to do his residency in Florida. He asked me to go with him, but I still had my senior year left.”

  “And he wouldn’t wait for you to graduate and marry you then?”

  She hesitates, a little color returning to her face. “Well, to be honest, he never really … proposed—he just talked about us being together. But he would have,” she adds quickly. “I’m sure he would have. But he wanted to live together first.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Oh, probably because of Nana. She said men don’t pay for the cow if they get the milk for free.”

  Yep, that sounds like my grandmother. “But this dude can pay for a whole farm.” Interesting that he never bought one, staying single long past the age when it’s cool. “Did you see him after he moved?”

  She stares at the page. “After college I met Daddy, and I was going to go see Jim, but …” Her voice trails off. “Things happened, you know.”

  I know. My birthday is seven months after their wedding anniversary.

  She blows out an exasperated breath and gives me a shaky smile. “Jim Monroe never really offered more than … cohabitation. Then I met your father and discovered what it was like when a man really cared about me. Frankly, until this minute, I forgot all about Jim. He was a go-getter, that’s for sure.”

  Closing the magazine, she reaches to put it on the rack behind her, then shudders a little before tossing it into the cart on top of some groceries, a pair of pliers, and a thick roll of electrical cable.

  “You’re buying that magazine?” I ask.

  “So I can get a taste of how the other half lives.”

  Right. The other half that we’ll never be. We’ll never have much money, let alone a house that could go in a magazine. At least, not unless one of my dad’s so-far-out-there-it-inhabits-its-own-time-zone inventions takes off.

  “Looks like the other half lives with pizza ovens,” I say, ready to make light because Mom looks a little wrecked over this.

  “Money isn’t everything.” She swipes at her face with her hands, making a holy mess out of her mascara. I don’t have the heart to tell her, though. “Anyway, this is what’s meant to be. I have you and Theo. And Daddy.”

  “Instead of a twenty-bazillion-square-foot house.”

  Without responding, she shoves the cart to the checkout line and starts unloading with a little more force than necessary.

  I can’t help flipping the magazine open to the article again. I’ve never seen anything like this place. A mongo curved staircase, room after room of total luxury, a master bedroom that kind of hurts to look at, it’s so gorgeous.

  “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be that rich,” I muse.

  “Money doesn’t make you happy,” Mom insists, whipping carrots and lettuce out of the cart. “Money doesn’t make you laugh when you’re lonely, or make you full of contentment on Christmas morning.”

  Sorry, but on Christmas morning, money can make you really happy.

  I hold out a picture of a giant pool built on the edge of a patio, the water spilling over into an ocean beyond it. “Looks like money does buy something called an infinity pool overlooking the Bay of Biscayne.”

  She shrugs, opening her wallet. “He wasn’t capable of loving anyone but himself,” she murmurs. Then she takes the magazine from my hand and plops it on the conveyor, the last item to be rung up. “I can’t believe I’m spending six dollars on that.”

  “Did you love him?” The question sort of pops out without full brain engagement. Maybe it isn’t my place, but I really want to know.

  “I … I …” She slides the credit card slowly through the machine, holding her breath a little as she always does until it clears. “I did.”

  When she scribbles her name and flips the last plastic bag off the round bag holder, I can’t resist pushing a little more. “Did you love him more than Dad?”

  I stay close to her while she rolls the cart to the auto-open door. I’m dying to know the answer, but kind of scared to hear it, too. I don’t want her to love anyone more than Dad.

  “I loved him the way a woman loves a man she wants to change, but knows she never will.”

  Which makes zero sense and strikes me as a non-answer. “What did you want to change about him?”

  “I wanted him to be faithful, for one thing, which I never really could be sure he was. And I wanted him …” She thinks for a minute as we wait for a car to pass. “I wanted him to love me for who I was, and I never felt quite good enough for him. You’ll understand someday.”

  Someday? I understood about ten minutes ago on a school bus.

  We stop talking about it on the hike to the van, which is parked in another zip code. About halfway there, she freezes in her tracks with an SUV behind us.

  “I really love Daddy,” she announces. “I mean, you and Theo are all I live for. What would I be with Jim Monroe? Rich and lonely, that’s what.”

  “Maybe you’d still have us.” I guide her to the left to let the SUV by.

  “I wouldn’t have you,” she insists, giving the cart a push toward the minivan. “Maybe I’d have some other kid. But not you. Not Theo.”

  She reaches for the dented hatchback—a mistake of backing into Theo’s basketball hoop that would cost $2,600 to fix, so we lived with it—and yanks the door upward.

  “You don’t know that,” I say.

  “You wouldn’t exist, Annie.”

  How does she know? “I look way more like you than Dad,” I tell her. “People always say I’m your clone. So I might look just the same, only I’d be rich and living in Miami Beach.” I look up at the typically gray Pittsburgh skies. “That’d be nice.”

  She flips a plastic bag into the back.
“You are who you are because of Daddy and me. Get in, and I’ll put the cart away.”

  I do, watching her walk to the cart return, the frown deepening that line between her eyebrows that she’s always trying to hide with her bangs.

  When she climbs into the driver’s seat, she lets out a little sigh. “I’m not hungry. Let’s just skip Eat’n Park and go home.”

  “ ’Kay.” I wasn’t in a Superburger mood anymore, anyway.

  As she sticks the key into the ignition, she makes a little grunt. “Oh, sh—sugar. I forgot Dad’s duct tape.”

  “He has enough at home,” I say. “It’s just … under something else.”

  Her eyes shutter closed for a second. “Don’t I know it.”

  “You can show him that magazine and tell him you got distracted.”

  Looking over her shoulder, she backs out of the spot. “He doesn’t need to see that. It would just make him feel inadequate.”

  “Or give him an idea for a new invention. The infinity bathtub.” I laugh, but Mom doesn’t. And she would totally have laughed at that, like, half an hour ago.

  I lean my head against the window, still sick from the bus incident and a little sad about the rich doctor who might have been my father.

  Courtney wouldn’t laugh at me if I had a house so big it was in a magazine. Not when I got a Z or a Beemer for my birthday, and had … a date to homecoming. I sure wouldn’t be wearing crappy clothes and—

  Mom’s hand lands on my arm, yanking me out of my thoughts. “I love who you are, honey,” she says. “I wouldn’t give you up for all the money in the world. It would just be nice not to have to worry about money constantly.”

  “Nice” is an understatement. With that much money, I wouldn’t be a nobody. My “dad” could give me a boob job, better cheekbones, and a smaller nose. I’d be at the top of the A-list, not target practice for backpacks.

  “So don’t even think about it again,” she says. “Because you are who you are meant to be. Annie Nutter, daughter of Mel and Emily Nutter.”

  “But you don’t know, Mom. What if I were the daughter of Jim and Emily Monroe? What if you’d had a daughter with a different husband? Who knows if I would still be me?”

  “That’s a silly question.”

  Is it? Would I play the violin? Would I have my same lousy hair but pretty blue eyes? Would I still love Jolly Ranchers and SpongeBob, or would I be too rich and cool for candy and old-school cartoons? Would Lizzie be my BFF? Would Theo still gross me out? Would I still be the poster child for the website My Life Is Average? Or worse?

  I think not.

  “If you even existed,” Mom says. “You’d be somebody else entirely if you had different parents.”

  “But wouldn’t I have the same soul?”

  Mom looks at me, her eyes clear now, but still mascara-smudged. “I have no idea. Nobody can answer that question.”

  But I think about it all the way home.

  CHAPTER THREE

  If Architectural Digest did a pictorial on our home, it wouldn’t be called “Living a Flawless Life.” More like “Navigating the Nutter Clutter.” The minute I make my way through the maze of discarded printers, car parts, and rusted tools in the garage and manage to get into the kitchen, Theo comes bounding up from the basement, hollering for our attention, with Watson the Howling Basset on backup.

  “This is it!” Theo announces, drama-king style. “Dad has done it this time!” He opens his mouth and burps. Every word my ten-year-old moron brother speaks is punctuated with an exclamation point and a belch.

  “What are you doing home so early?” I ask, dumping Walmart bags onto the counter.

  “Dad picked me up from school to help him. Wait till you see this!” He grabs my arm. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Getting the rest of the stuff.”

  “You gotta come downstairs!” he insists, pulling at my arm.

  “Okay, okay.” I slip out of his slimy touch just as Mom comes in.

  “Mom! Dad’s got the best idea ever! This one is killer! We’re gonna be rich!” Theo shouts.

  Mom and I share a quick look, but Theo misses it, of course, as he digs through the Walmart bags and yanks out the electrical cable. “Did you get the duct tape? ’Cause that’ll really finish the whole thing.”

  Mom’s shoulders sink as she reaches into one of the bags, and I know exactly what she’s looking for. Not duct tape.

  “We forgot it,” she says.

  “No biggie. Dad rigged it up with something else.”

  Of course he did. Dad’s middle name is Rigged It Up.

  “Tell Dad I …” Mom inches the magazine out of a bag and avoids my gaze. “I’ll come and see whatever it is later,” she finishes weakly. “You go down, Annie.”

  I follow Theo down the basement stairs to find Dad standing next to a full-length mirror, the kind you might hang on the inside of a closet door. His curly brown hair is messed, like he’s been running his hands through it a zillion times, and his glasses are crooked from being pushed up his nose. But behind those nerdy horn-rims, his eyes are bright with a look I’ve seen so many times.

  Hope. Enthusiasm. Sheer lunacy.

  “C’mere, Annie,” Dad says, waving me past a carton overflowing with old telephone books. “Stand in front of this mirror and get on that scale.”

  “Hey, is that my laptop?” I almost choke at the sight of my secondhand el crappo Averatec on the floor. It’s the only computer I have! It’s completely taken apart, with a circuit board on the floor connected to other tiny electronic gadgetry I suspect was all taken from the discard bin at RadioShack.

  “I had to borrow the motherboard,” Dad says. “I’ll put it back together again.”

  “Yeah, that’s what you said about my flip-flops,” I mutter. “What’s that other stuff?”

  “A solid-state relay, some rectifiers, and a couple of PIN diodes.”

  “And is that Mom’s digital scale?” I shoot a look at Dad. “Do you actually want to die?”

  “Just get on the scale, Annie. You’ll see.”

  All I can see is my precious—if cheap and as slow as a diseased turtle—laptop disassembled next to the digital scale that we got Mom for Christmas last year. Still, I step on the scale, because when Dad is in this mood, you have to humor him.

  “Look in the mirror.”

  On the left side of my reflection, a series of red numbers and letters appears: 70 in. 143 lbs. 20.5 bmi.

  “See?” Dad says. “Height, weight, and body mass index.”

  “Not mine,” I say, doing some quick math. “Unless I gained twenty pounds and grew five inches.”

  “Well, that’s a little glitch,” he admits, coming around the front of the mirror. “I can only get it to register one set of information now, but I have a friend at Process Engineering, and he’s going to help me iron that out. But wait, Annie. Here’s the amazing part. This mirror and scale combination alone would make a very cool product, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, if you want a full-body view while weighing, that’s a neat idea, Dad.” Not sure it would sell, but then, what invention of his does?

  “Now comes the good part,” he says, kneeling down to the electronics on the floor. “Nobody can touch this contraption but me because it’s so delicate that an ant could ruin it by walking over the top. But …” He takes out something that looks like an iPhone knockoff, obviously used and refurbed by RadioShack, and starts to flick the screen.

  “Watch the mirror, Annie.”

  At first, the change is barely noticeable. My waist narrows. My hips flare. My boobs … whoa.

  “Holy cow, Dad. That is so not my body.”

  “Look at your face.”

  My hair has grown, my eyes have widened, my skin has cleared. Dear God, I got cheekbones.

  “Dad!” And the image moves … as I do. “This is unbelievable! How are you doing that?”

  “I programmed about a hundred faces in here, and I’m just picking the best of the best
. I used that iPhone app Famous Faces, where you can put your picture in and replace all your features with celebrities’. Now look at you. Like it?”

  Like it? “It’s perfect!”

  “Then voila!” The phone makes the click of a picture, and he holds up the screen to show me. “Saved on the phone in a new app.”

  I look from the phone to the mirror to my dad. And back to the mirror, because, wow, I am hot.

  “Those numbers will change on the side when we get this thing wired right,” he adds quickly. “So you know what weight you’re shooting for to have that particular body. Doesn’t it just rock?”

  Oh, God, Dad. Please don’t say that. Ever. “It’s pretty cool,” I say, getting off the scale.

  “Pretty cool?” Theo chokes instead of burping, for once. “Dude, this is, like, the freakiest.”

  The freakiest? Theo is worse than Dad, if that’s even possible. “But why would people buy it?” I ask.

  “Visualization, Annie!” Dad’s eyes are wild. “It is the key to success. Just ask any sports psychologist! Use your mind to picture what you want to be, and you’ll be it. Now you can visualize in full color, and then put it on your iPhone so you can carry your image with you as a constant reminder of how you want to look. Just think what motivation that could be to a dieter!”

  “But I can’t get my eyes to look like that.”

  “Maybe with the right makeup.”

  “Or plastic surgery,” I say dryly, fighting the urge to sigh. Dad’s inventions are brilliant and ridiculous, and so is he. “So, uh, who do you think would buy this, Dad?” I ask.

  “Only the six billion people who’ve downloaded that Famous Faces app.” He takes the phone and waves it. “This country is obsessed with looks and weight loss. This is the most incredible combination of the two in history!”

  Easy to see where Theo gets his drama-king gene. “That’s saying a lot, Dad.”

  “Well.” He shrugs modestly. “It needs work, obviously. I have to somehow create a permanent motherboard and computer that attaches to the mirror, but once I do, and I patent the smartphone app, then I have sole ownership of what will be known as the hottest new invention of this millennium. I could get this into every health club in America.”